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I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?
--
"Words Are Easy, Books Are Not," interview with Bob Morris, The New York Times (1994-08-10), Late Edition, Section C, page 1, column 1

 

Fran Lebowitz

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I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should.
Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do.

 

Walt Disney

 

[About his first-born child] My mother looked at it and said, "Oh, how precious!" I don't know why she said it. Well, I didn't know then. I know now, because my mother put a curse on me. A long time ago, I remember when I was a child what she said, and I later found out that mothers, all mothers, put a curse on their children. They say, "I hope, when you get married, you have some children who act exactly the same way that you act." And this curse WORKS! I mean, it started with that child! My wife and I have not been intellectuals since. Oh, my wife was pretty good for a while, but it didn't last that long. It didn't last two years.

 

Bill Cosby

 

The Web version of the ad uses a longer misquote: "If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, "well, it must be because I was just so smart." There are a lot of smart people out there. "It must be because I worked harder than everybody else." Let me tell you something — if you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

 

Barack Obama

 

One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. The child has not yet had the chance to know what it is like to be a grownup; he believes, even, that being a grownup is a mistake he will never make—when he grows up he will keep on being a child, a big child with power. So the child and grownup live in mutual love, misunderstanding, and distaste. Children shout and play and cry and want candy; grownups say Ssh! and work and scold and want steak. There is no disputing tastes as contradictory as these. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grownups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again—still, they are members of a different species. God is, I suppose, what our parents were; certainly the ogre of the stories is so huge, so powerful, and so stupid because that is the way a grownup looks to a child.
Grownups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them.

 

Randall Jarrell

 

Adulthood does not exist. Man is an eternal child.

 

Nelson Rodrigues